Educated: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Tara spends the summer making—and blessing—homeopathic remedies for Mother while her brothers work in the junkyard and on the mountain with Dad. One afternoon, Luke, Tara’s seventeen-year-old brother, is helping Dad drain gasoline from the tanks of old cars before putting them into the crusher. Tara remembers lunch that afternoon with “unsettling clarity”: she and her family are eating casserole, and then Mother puts Tara on dish duty while she goes off to consult with another midwife on a complicated pregnancy. Luke and Dad head back up the mountain after lunch and resume work—but Luke’s leg catches fire when he goes to remove a car’s gas tank using a cutting torch. Luke, who has tied his jeans on with a piece of rope like he does every morning, is unable to get out of them, and takes off running through the grass, starting a fire up on the mountain.

Tara, unaware of what’s happening up on the mountain, is washing dishes when she hears Luke’s strangled screams. She looks out the window to see him hobbling across the grass, calling for Mother—the jeans on his left leg are melted away, and the skin has begun to peel away from his burned thigh “like wax dripping from a cheap candle.” Tara grabs a bottle of Rescue Remedy—a homeopathic for shock—and goes out to the lawn to tend to Luke. His eyes have rolled back in his head, and he is screaming that his leg is on fire.

Tara, only ten, doesn’t know what to do for Luke. She goes to fetch an ice pack to hold against the burn, but at the contact, Luke screams. Tara thinks of a way she can cool down Luke’s leg, and decides that putting it in a large plastic garbage bin full of cool water will do the trick. She drags out the can and begins filling it with water from a hose, but then realizes that the filthy can will no doubt cause an infection in Luke’s leg, so she wraps his leg in a garbage bag first. The cool water does soothe Luke, who refuses to take his leg from the bin even after Dad gets back from the mountain.

When Mother comes home that night, she tends to Luke’s wounds, cutting the plastic bag away and getting to work debriding the burns and dead tissue. Mother dresses the wounds in a salve of her own making, but admits that she’s never seen a burn as bad as Luke’s. That night, as Luke burns up with fever, Tara and Mother feed him tinctures of herbs—which do nothing to dull his pain. Every night that week, as Tara falls asleep, she dreams of the fire she did not witness.

Luke is confined to bed for weeks, and Dad instructs the family to tell their friends and neighbors at church that Luke is just under the weather—he warns them that there will be trouble if the government finds out about Luke’s leg, stating that if Luke gets taken away and put into a hospital, he’ll get an infection and die.

Tara blocks out the memory of the afternoon Luke got burned for over eighteen years. Now, at twenty-nine, as she sits down to write and reconstruct the memory, she realizes that there is an inconsistency in the story she and her siblings have taken for granted all these years: the question of who put out the fire on the mountain. Tara tells herself that Dad must have put the fire out, but then wonders why Dad, if he had been on the mountain with Luke when he caught fire, wouldn’t have helped him back to the house. Tara checks in with her brother Richard about the memory in an attempt to get to the bottom of things, and Richard tells Tara that Dad stayed on the mountain to put out the brush fire while Luke drove back to the house.

As Tara looks back on the memory of that day, she finds something new bubbling to the surface: an image of Mother slathering Dad’s hands that evening in one of her salves. She deduces that Dad must have decided to stay on the mountain and put out the fire before it spread to the house. She imagines her father beating back the flames with his shirt while Luke drove down the mountain. In a footnote, Tara reveals that Luke remembers the incident entirely differently than she does: he remembers Dad bringing him down the mountain, administering the Rescue Remedy for shock, and putting him in a cool bath.